If you haven’t heard about S.O.P.A. yet and why it needs to be stopped, spend five minutes and read on.

What Is S.O.P.A.?

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the less known PROTECTIP (PIPA) are proposed legislation that aim to give more control to the U.S. government and copyright holders to thwart piracy online. Sadly, the legislation will instead give our government the power to blacklist sites that allegedly contain any small amount of infringing content, thereby blocking the whole site from users. As an example, if I post a video on YouTube of my cat being funny and it happens to have a pop song playing in the background, YouTube has to remove it quickly or face harsh consequences. And if they’re not fast enough? That’s when Uncle Sam gets to start messing with DNS (the naming system of the Internet), making the site unreachable by normal means to most people in the U.S. If that doesn’t work, private companies (RIAA and MPAA, for example), can get advertising and payment companies like Google and PayPal to shut down the accounts of the allegedly offending site.

In this case, YouTube could vanish to anyone in the U.S. and lose all advertising revenue if I don’t edit some music out of my kitty cat video. Sounds reasonable, right?

And if you want to read the full text, here’s H.R. 3261
Pay attention to 102(c)(2)(A)(i) regarding DNS re-routing and 102(c)(2)(B) regarding search engines.

If all that’s too much to read, check out the SOPA infographic from Mashable or watch a video about the legislation below:

How You Can Protest

Even if you don’t have a site, you can make your voice heard. That link will do the work for you to connect you to your senators to voice your opinion about SOPA/PIPA. Politely urge them to consider the freedoms we fight so hard to protect before voting on this horrible legislation.

Share this post on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +. Better yet, share any of the helpful links above.

Stop waiting for bad ideas to become laws.

Update: It looks like our politicians are listening, promising to make changes to the bill to help with our concerns, but we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of it. At this point, the bill may be vastly changed for the better or may just die completely.

About the author

Joe Colburn is a software engineer specializing in PHP and a technology enthusiast. Always eager to dive into new and exciting things, Joe writes about anything technology related news and products that he thinks you will also be excited about. Find Joe Colburn on Google+ or by any of the links below.

I can’t believe this sort of a draconian law was even taken seriously let alone actually put up for consideration. Just goes to show much pull the media companies have over the government. Hopefully, common sense prevails and SOPA and PIP are done away with and all such future bills are also never entertained again.

What we see today, the day after, is that many politicians have begun to think about after reading the comments of politicians in various newspapers in the United States. a good result maybe with this rebellion over the internet.

Hi Joe! SOPA if passed wil be the blueprint of all countries that wants to censor the internet. Greedy corporations will rake huge bad karma when this garbage is passed. Imagine singing a cover of Michael Jackson will be prohibited in youtube and the wannabee singer can be jailed for singing “Thriller”. SOPA is WACK.

It looks like the blackouts did make a difference with a number of senators who sponsored the bill announcing they now oppose it. I suspect a watered-down but similar bill will be submitted some time in the future however.